


Overlap

by Ahsim



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Prisoner of War, Swearing, Torture, Violence, WWII, mentions of discrimination, physical and sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:37:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahsim/pseuds/Ahsim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They had dreams, of being a doctor and a musician.  Museums in Europe.  Applause in New York.  Pride.  Accolades.</p>
<p>--I wasn’t supposed to be here.--</p>
<p>But “here” was where Heero and Trowa found themselves: the Pacific theatre, in the sweltering heat of the Philippines.  They found themselves in the rough confines of a prisoner camp where, for some, the differences between guard and guarded were small at best. </p>
<p>Cruelty and the worst of mischance brought them together; or perhaps it was fate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overlap

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Shoi/Persisting for all of her historical and linguistic knowledge. Many thanks to MissAmberly for all of her patient beta-ing and almost daily support. And many thanks to my followers on tumblr for thinking that I could pull this off.
> 
> Please note that as this is an AU, I have taken certain liberties with characters and their ethnic backgrounds--the most important being Heero/Jae Hee's. "Heero" is his Japanese name; "Jae Hee" is what he considers himself.
> 
> This is the first part of what's going to be much longer work, because as I was writing this I realized that I needed a lot more space than 15,000 words. Yay, another project for me.
> 
> While not explicit at the moment, this fic will get darker. I will try to post all appropriate warnings.

 

I

“Can’t sleep?”  Duo’s voice came out of the darkness above Trowa’s head: a soft, smooth sour note in the angry buzzing-and-droning, pestilent song of the jungle.  Trowa was notorious for insomnia, though, and Duo was a short-sleeper, so he wasn’t particularly surprised.  He leaned his head back against the felled tree he had camped by, careful this time of the sharp knob.               

Duo leaned over the trunk, looking down at him.  His helmet was tipped forward, casting his face in almost total darkness.  But the fact that he could see that—the fact that the muted browns of his fatigues were slightly brighter than the black behind him—meant that somewhere past the trees and the bugs, dawn was starting.               

“You’re going to ruin your eyes, writing in the dark like that,” he said softly.  The troop discovered three days ago, when Wilson got shot in the head a scant ten seconds before the Japanese were on them again, that sound travelled quite well through the jungle.  Talking, now, was a brief affair; clipped little whispers when the ten-men team was trudging shoulder-to-shoulder, trying not to think about what was past the first few lines of trees, where the jungle turned to shadow even in the daylight.                

There was almost no talking at night.                

Trowa lowered his head back to the small book balanced clumsily on his knee.  His writing was a thin, black line, curling precisely across the page.  Trowa scanned the barely legible words, turning his pencil delicately between his fingers.  He had mastered the art of midnight work years ago, when his grandfather dragged him out of bed some nights for flute and some nights for French and there had never been enough money for electricity or gas or even candles sometimes.                

If it had ruined his eyes, Trowa never noticed.  It was surprisingly easy to ignore things that always were.              

“At least I’m not going to accidentally scalp myself,” he said.              

Duo kept his hair long and braided, which was most certainly against regulation.  But code-talkers (good ones especially) tended to bend the rules, and because code-talkers (good ones, especially) were “winning the war,” no one mentioned it.              

Duo was a code-talker.  One of the best, in fact, but the only rule he ever really broke was the braid.  He tried to keep it out of the way, though: tucked down the back of his fatigues.  It slipped out though sometimes, especially when they were running.  And stiff as it was after a few weeks of not washing, it was still supple enough to catch twigs and leaves—or tangle in the underbrush.             

It had taken almost a full minute for Trowa to free him.  He would’ve managed it in half that time, except that the heavy pounding of Japanese foot soldiers made him tremble.               

Duo glanced at the braid currently draped over his shoulder.  He chuckled once and climbed over the trunk, dropping carefully down beside him.  His helmet dropped heavily onto Trowa’s head, pushing greasy hair into his eye.               

“Smart ass,” Duo said.  Trowa tugged the helmet off and shoved it on top of his own.  The two together made a somewhat-decent armrest at his side.                

“Wufei sleeping,” he asked as he flicked the hair from his face.  They hadn’t found clean water in days.  Their canteens were far too low to waste water on something like the oils and dirt and sweat in his hair.  But Trowa hated the way it clung to him in heavy, filthy clumps.               

Duo nodded.  “The bastard,” he said, playfulness making the curse a bit softer. “‘Mind over matter,’ he says, but I’m calling bullshit.  He’s just being lazy.”                  

Wufei was a lot of things—sometimes elitist, more-often-than-not difficult, _a genuine asshole—_ but “lazy” wasn’t one of them.  Trowa still didn’t quite get the joke.              

“He took last watch yesterday,” he said, pencil spinning slowly over his fingers, “And two watches the day before.”               

“So did I, so did you, and you still wake up swearing when Johnson trips over his helmet or Barnett farts in your face.”                          

He did, which was why Trowa had claimed the one-body space by the tree as fast as he could.  He slept little enough as it was.  Honestly, he _wished_ he could sleep like Wufei.  Trowa shrugged once and turned back to his writing.  Duo snorted and gave his shoulder a light shove.               

“Hey.  Don’t forget: you were my friend first.  You’re supposed to agree with me, remember?”               

“Is that how this goes?”               

“We have been the absolute worst influence on you.”               

Trowa supposed that they had.  He certainly hadn’t been interested in making friends when he got his draft card, and even less inclined after the insanity that was his (very brief) basic training.  During that short hell of grueling, regimented exercise, Trowa had made the mistake of swearing in French several times and briefly mentioning his single audition to the harmonic, both of which managed to isolate him from his “peers.”  He left basic, bundle up in badly-fitting fatigues, to whispers of “rich boy” behind his back and with several bets hanging over his head.  The most popular was “first shot off the plane.”               

Considering he was faster, a better shot, and, in short, just a cut above the rest of them, the bets almost made him smile.  “Rich boy” almost got him reprimanded.               

A reputation of “spoiled, selfish, and weak” followed him to his platoon, where it lasted for less than a week.  Apparently, if Duo declared that someone was “okay,” well, they simply were.  The platoon trusted his judgment, which was probably why Wufei survived long enough to gain his reputation of excellent but irritating.  Trowa himself hadn’t noticed the difference between the Japanese and Chinese—and less between them and the myriad of other Asians—until being dropped into battle.  He doubted the other Americans had fared much better.  “Asian was Asian,” after all.               

At the last base, Wufei had gotten a letter, and Duo had squeezed his elbow gently as he read it.  Wufei’s teeth ground harder and harder with each line, and somehow Trowa knew someone had been relocated.  It didn’t matter, little things like being Chinese and serving the country, because Asian was Asian to the rest of them.                 

There were benefits, though, to being Duo’s and Wufei’s “friend,” apart from the obvious of being spared an ill-gotten reputation.  Wufei had helped him find better fatigues, Duo a better rifle, and they both showed him how to load fast and shoot straight under fire (something basic had “forgotten”).  Wufei taught him better basics for a simple camp, and Duo, after Trowa had slit his thumb and swore, drilled him in tongues.  First German, when they weren’t sure where they were going, and then Japanese when they did.  Duo had a thing for language, and while he couldn’t make fully-coherent sentences yet, he knew enough vocabulary to count, overhear orders, and confirm they would give “no quarter.”               

Words he gave to Trowa.  Japanese was hard and foreign in his mouth, but useful, and Duo said his pronunciation was passable.  He spoke it with a French accent, though, which made Duo laugh.  Trowa occasionally pretended to be offended.               

Duo settled back against the trunk.  “Letter,” he asked, shifting his shoulders as he looked at Trowa’s slowly moving pencil with a curiosity that wasn’t too intrusive.               

Trowa shook his head.  “Journal.”  

Not that he didn’t write his sister.  The bottom of his backpack was full of letters for her, for when—or rather if—they reached a base.  Catherine would respond to each and every one, even though they all sounded much the same.  There were things, Trowa had discovered, that she couldn’t know about the war, and there were things that he couldn’t know about home.  In the few letters he’d gotten, before getting letters became really difficult, black ink had kept a word or two, and in one case an entire paragraph, from him.               

Trowa was honest, so he wouldn’t be surprised if all Catherine ever read was “I love you, I miss you, stay safe.”  Hence, the journal.               

Of course, there was no guarantee that Catherine would see it or any of the others in his pack.  If he made it home in (mostly) one piece, he could tell her himself.  So he would probably burn them then.  And if he didn’t make it, there would be the small matter of getting his body home.  They had left Wilson, and half a dozen others, where they fell, with no way of knowing exactly where.  By the time the war ended, something would probably have eaten most of them.                

In the off-chance that his body did make it home, though, it would more likely than not pass through the army first.  There was nothing to stop them from taking a few mildly-offensive journals off the list of the deceased’s personal effects.  And because Catherine wasn’t aware of their existence, and Duo could very well end up dead himself, there would be no one to ask after them if the matter arose.

Trowa was used to the repetitive work, though.  So much so that even the obvious futility of it couldn’t quite keep him from at least jotting down a note or two daily.  Trowa licked the tip of his pencil—an awful habit made even worse by the filth and disease in the jungle—and found his place.

               

_\--third day of running, or maybe it’s the fourth.  Or more.  No one’s died since Wilson, and a death is a good mark in time.  At the very least it’s convenient.  Of course, the sun rises and the sun sets, making the shadows lighter and darker in turns.  But when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, listening for a cracking stick or the low babble of your hunters, “day X” becomes a bit less important than “the day I might die.”_

_We’re still heading for Bataan.  Maybe.  We tried to double-back after losing them the second time.  Everyone thinks the sun’s in the right place, but Duo’s not so sure.  And neither am I.  “All units report to Bataan,” but we haven’t seen an army man in days._

_Unless you count the Japanese, and I try not to._

               

Beside him, Duo began to mumble.               

The low stream of sound, usually wholly foreign and yet, on occasion, almost disturbingly familiar, was no longer particularly interesting to Trowa.  Not now that he knew what it was.  The likelihood, of course, that he would ever pick up more than a word or two of Navajo was slim at best; and the likelihood that he would ever be able to use it properly was practically negligible.  Duo had already explained (once and almost begrudgingly) that the code was more than just words.  Much more.  He would never understand the code, but Trowa refused, even accidentally, to put even a crack in the system, and a word in its appropriate context would most definitely be a crack.               

So Trowa forced himself to find Duo’s repetitions uninteresting.  He forced his curiosity at the susurrus, with its unique tones and qualities, and the low guttural rhythm that thrummed like distant drumming, into boredom.  Even irritation.  It was safer that way.               

Trowa had finished his current page and Duo had slipped into practicing his rudimentary Japanese when there was rustling behind them.  They stiffened.  Trowa’s boot slid beneath the leather strap of his rifle.  Behind them, the lieutenant let out a rasping mumble as he crawled out of his makeshift bed.  The man groaned, a sound more pained than satisfied.  The lieutenant was always trying to pop his lower back; this morning it apparently wasn’t cooperating.  He grumbled for a moment before moving further away, and then there were the quiet complaints of their fellows as he and the watch roused their small camp.                

Duo’s shoulders eased as he let out of quiet sigh.  He smiled and leaned over.  Trowa pressed back into the trunk and removed his elbow from the stack of helmets.  Duo hooked his helmet with his fingers and twirled it up his forearm, onto his head.              

“Up we go,” Duo said.                

Trowa waited until Duo was back over the fallen tree before closing his journal, tucking his pencil between the pages.  Trowa slipped a rubber band from his wrist and twisted it over the worn, wrinkled covers.  He tucked it into his pack, shoving it down to the nook it had carved for itself between the dressings and spare rounds.  Stretching and grimacing at the knots in his back, Trowa crawled over to his unused bedroll.  He rolled it tightly, brushing off the dirt and mud and dead leaves as he went.  The thin, scratchy mat was uncomfortable enough; he didn’t need the additional itch of dirt.  Trowa secured it to the top of his pack and then slipped his arms through the straps.  He grabbed his rifle before standing.  He’d learned his lesson early: bending down with the backpack bearing down on his back was unnecessary.  And stupid.  Even now, just standing straight, the pack shifted and pulled on sore, knotted muscles.               

He took his time climbing over the tree.                

The last of their platoon—ten men of various ages and skills and home fronts, all wearing the same exhaustion and fear like tattered clothes—broke camp in relative silence.  Barnett was shaking Johnson, still curled on top of his bedroll.  He hadn’t been quite the same since some of Wilson’s brain had splattered on him.  And Marcus’s knee was getting worse.  He clutched at Newman’s shoulders as he tried to stand, his left knee refusing to bend and take the weight for almost a minute.  Newman had been on watch, too, so he nearly dropped him.              

If they were lucky, half of them were going to make it to the rendezvous.  _We don’t even know where Bataan_ is _._                

On the outer-most ring of camp, where the trees were starting to turn from grey to green in the sparse dawn, Duo was waking Wufei with his foot.  He bore down on Wufei’s hip with a little bit of his weight for less than a few seconds before Wufei’s hand lashed out, grabbed his ankle and pulled.  Duo stumbled, his arms spinning wildly.  Wufei barely managed to catch his hand in time and keep him from tumbling back into the dirt.  Code-talker or not, the lieutenant would have a fit if Duo crashed noisily to the ground.               

Wufei tugged him upright, using the leverage of Duo’s arm to pull himself up.  Duo slipped out of his grip.  He waited until Wufei was up and brushing himself off before aiming a kick at his rear.               

Trowa paused, crouching carefully on the slick, dead wood.  Dawn was coming in earnest, now.  There were touches of soft gold on the ground, now.  The trees nearest them were the curious familiar-but-different brown-and-green that they still weren’t quite used to.  In a few hours, even with the thick canopy, the bark would be hot to the touch.  And although the trees just beyond the edge of camp were still heavy with the night’s shadows, it was getting easier and easier to see the hard lines of the trunks.                

And the places where the shadows moved.              

Trowa’s brow furrowed as he watched the spaces between the trees.  For a moment, he thought it was nothing: far branches rustling, or maybe even a trick of the eyes.  He had barely slept after all.  But then Trowa caught a glimpse of metal, and Barnett, who had slipped past the first line of trees to take a piss, suddenly bowed backwards.  Red dripped from his throat as he fell.               

Under the rush of uniforms, the pounding of boots and the loud, guttural swears, Trowa screamed, “run.”               

The lieutenant went down next, cursing as the Japanese foot soldier bore down on him.  Three more leapt out of the trees as the two of them hit the ground and rolled, and by the time the first was up and the lieutenant was clutching at his slit throat, Trowa had the butt of his rifle against his shoulder.               

His first shot went wide, landing with an awful splintering into the trees.  Trowa rolled back off the trunk and reloaded.               

No one else had a rifle in hand; half of them hadn’t even picked them up yet.  When Trowa popped back up from behind the trunk, Johnson was dead and Newman was bleeding but trying to wrestle away a knife.  A bayonet sliced him through the back.                

Wufei had slept on the eastern side of camp.  He and Duo hadn’t been noticed yet.                

Trowa aimed at the foot soldier nearest to them, clipping him in the shoulder as he brutalized Marcus.  The shot had the effect Trowa wanted.  The bleeding foot soldier turned more towards the trunk, away from the east, away from Duo and Wufei.  Trowa waited a second too long to drop down, watching Duo scoop up his rifle; he nearly caught a bullet in the head.               

“Get him out of here,” he shouted.               

There were rumors—terrible ones—about what the Japanese did to their prisoners.  Especially their “valuable” ones.  And if they discovered that Duo was a code-talker, he would be much more than valuable.  Trowa tossed his rifle down and wriggled out of his pack.  He needed speed.                

Past the trunk, there were hard, muttering orders, and Duo cursing. Trowa fumbled his rifle into his hands and popped back up.              

A Japanese foot soldier was waiting on the other side.  There was a flash of steel.  Trowa reared back and missed the blade by inches.  The shot he took sang up into the trees.               

“Trowa!”               

“Move!”               

“ _Now_ Wufei!”               

Between his wild swings with the rifle and the sparks as the knife scraped against the barrel, Trowa saw Wufei manhandling Duo towards the trees.  Pulling him before one swing, pushing him after the next.  Duo twisted out of his hands often, raising his rifle with a feral snarl, but he never got it high enough to shoot before Wufei pulled him around again.                

And then one of the foot soldiers was in the way, and Trowa couldn’t see Duo and Wufei at all.               

He ducked under a particularly wild stab.  The edge of the knife still caught his sleeve.  It tore the fabric from elbow to wrist, and there was a sudden, lingering, wet pain.  Trowa shifted his grip and swung the rifle hard, turning with the arc.  The barrel connected with the soldier’s temple with a hard, jarring thud.  It nearly tripped Trowa out of his pivot.  The shot he took when he stumbled straight was lower than he hoped.  It hit the foot soldier hurtling towards them in the knee instead of the back.  The man tumbled forward.  Duo stumbled back, into Wufei’s arms.  He stared at Trowa for a moment, eyes wide, mouth open with fear.  But then Wufei was dragging him away, into the trees.               

Something hit Trowa hard in the side, and then he saw nothing but the jungle floor.                

As he squirmed and bucked, clawing after the rifle that spun away, Trowa realized he was going to die.  He realized, as he twisted under the hands ripping at his fatigues and skin and hair, that he would never see his cramped attic room again.   Or his sister’s loving frown.  Or that tender smile.  The last thing Trowa would see would be dirt and tree and mud-caked boots as the soldiers watched him being gutted.  The last metal he’d ever feel would be a knife.               

He should have played more.  Fought more.  Said more.  _Kissed him.  He didn’t even know—_

Pain, hot and white, erupted at the back of his head.  Trowa, cheek pressed into the dirt, struggled against it, only distantly aware that it was too long for a bullet and too dull for a knife.  But then the white turned black and Trowa drowned in it.

 

II 

Jae Hee supposed that there was one thing his father’s name was still good for: he didn’t have to _touch_ the bodies when they missed the graves.  That chore was for prisoners and his full-blooded “cousins.”  He had to “oversee” the work, of course, standing close enough to map bruises and cuts, count the ribs and ridges of their spines, and smell the urine and blood.  But he didn’t have to dirty his boots or hands.  He didn’t have to feel death’s weight.               

The executed were ten prisoners, “caught” in the early stages of an escape.  At least, that was the official story.  Unofficially, the rice shipment had been delayed for another few weeks, and even prisoners needed to eat something after a day in the quarry.  At best, the ten deaths may have saved a bag of rice.  There would be another execution in three days.               

The brutal truth, of course, was that one of the two executed Americans had spat on the colonel’s shoes. The poor idiot had lost a tooth during a beating and kept sucking the plug out.  He had spat blood, often and noisily and with very poor aim.  Of course, Jae Hee never saw the American blood on the colonel’s shoes, and if anyone should have, it should have been him; he spent several hours a week polishing them, after all.  He had learned years ago, though, that evidence was the last thing they needed for an excuse to punish you.               

Jae Hee shifted as he surveyed the work, neck uncomfortably warm. Midmorning and already the sun was brutal.  It beat down on his head and back until his pressed uniform felt tight and stifling.  He tugged the brim of his cap down his forehead to keep from pulling at his collar and cuffs.  The colonel and other officers would not accept weakness.  Not even for a moment and certainly not in front of the prisoners.  Besides, he had very little to complain about.  After all, his skin was mostly protected: jacket and slacks, gloves on his hands, a cap on his head.  Shoes. Occasionally, the sun touched his cheeks and nose, and the sensitive skin between nape and hairline.  There was medicine for that.  There was plenty of water.               

Prisoners could count themselves lucky if they had shoes _and_ a shirt without holes in it, neither of which afforded that much protection from the hard sun.  After ten—twelve—fourteen hours in the sun, they came back to their barless cells red and brown and blistered, falling over each other without actually falling because breaking the line earned a rifle butt to the spine, at the very least.                

Prisoners who fell at the quarry usually didn’t make back.               

They weren’t at the quarry yet.  They were at the grave, which was just outside the camp (downwind to keep the smell somewhat manageable).  That didn’t mean, however, that the prisoners were safe to slack off or fall down.  The guards’ guns were loaded, the officers’ swords sharp, and almost all of them were constantly looking for ways to alleviate the boredom of “dog-sitting.”  Jae Hee, too, although he was less than fond of the officers’ preferred entertainment.              

Of the ten, four prisoners, for one reason or another, missed the small group grave they had dug together.  As they were “escapees,” a half dozen of the remaining prisoners were tasked with laying the four in the grave, to let them feel the gravity of their “choices.”  The bodies were not to be thrown.  They had to be handed down, laid out carefully on their fellows, which meant that two of the six workers had to get in the grave and stand on the dead.  It had been Kawai’s “brilliant” idea, and Jae Hee’s responsibility to instruct the prisoners to prevent mistakes.                

The announcement had soured his already bad reputation among the prisoners.                

Two bodies had already been handed down.  The American and one of the locals they had procured were readying the third.  When he rolled the body onto its back, the American paused.  He fisted the thin fabric of his pants.  The camp made a point of separating the friends, platoons, and barely-familiar strangers who came through the gate—it was harder to organize when the men directly around you didn’t speak your language—but that didn’t mean they forgot familiar faces.  They had come in together, the two Americans.  Jae Hee remembered because they had been particularly difficult to separate, which had been curious.               

The American glanced up at him, death promised in his sneer, which was not as curious anymore.  Jae Hee tightened his grip on his rifle.  The American spat once before grabbing his dead comrade beneath the arms.                

If he was not among the dead in the next execution, Jae Hee would be very surprised.               

The colonel’s shadow appeared before the colonel, stretched out beside Jae Hee’s as he watched the deposal.  Jae Hee stiffened beneath the attention.                

“Excellent work, Heero,” the colonel said, patting Jae Hee’s shoulder once with a hard, bony hand.  “We might not have caught them without you.”               

Officially, they were escapees and the camp was within its rights to kill them.  Officially, Jae Hee had overheard their plans and exposed them, as was his duty.  It was a solid story, considering Jae Hee was the only petty officer who commanded not only Japanese and Mandarin but also English in several of its manifestations.                

But it was only a story.               

The colonel “commended” him just loud enough that the prisoners who understood Japanese glared at him when they dared.  And those who didn’t understand glared at him anyway.  A pat on the back, after all, was something of an international gesture.  _As if I needed reminding of my status._

“Thank you, sir,” he answered.               

The work went quickly after that, even with the American hesitating to drop his comrade’s corpse into the grave.  The colonel waited beside Jae Hee until the two prisoners stumbled out of the grave, using the arms of the American and the local for leverage, and all six had returned to their places in the crowd.  He allowed a moment of silence.  Several hundred eyes—many mostly dead, but some gleeful and expectant—watched the still grave until the moment grew awkward and heavy.  Then the colonel turned his head and nodded.  Kawai lifted a whistle to his lips.               

The prisoners turned en masse and trudged back to the camp.  Jae Hee waited until the colonel and the officers had started back before turning himself.  He took his place on the outer edge of the column, nearly three-quarters back from the front of the line.  Behind him, he heard the low mutterings of prisoners, and the lower mutterings of the two Korean guards marching at the tail of the column.  He cradled his rifle in his hands.               

_I should be in London right now._

He should probably consider himself lucky that he wasn’t.  The climate in Europe and the United States was, perhaps understandably, hostile towards Asians.  There were rumors of camps in the United States, not unlike the one they marched to now (although Jae Hee was somewhat confident that executions were a much rarer occurrence there).  And there was, of course, the small matter of the war.  The knowledge, however, that he was safe, or rather slightly safer, from being relocated, kidnapped, or killed didn’t take the sting out of the ruined plans.                

Europe was what his father had promised him, years ago when Jae Hee still believed in promises, his or otherwise.  He was supposed to have London or Munich, New York at the very least.  He was supposed to be at the forefront of the medical world.  A child prodigy, attending lectures, hosting presentations and demonstrations of radical, beautiful techniques.  Receiving accolades only men twice his age usually saw.                  

Not roasting in the Filipino sun with a few hundred broken men.  Not trudging between camp and quarry.  Not watching and waiting for stragglers and runners.  Not counting up the living and tallying the dead.  Day after day after day.                

Jae Hee should have been in London right now—on a special, highly competitive scholarship—after an impressive six months in medical school.  And if his father hadn’t died before his graduation, Jae Hee might be.  _Your heart couldn’t have waited two more weeks?_

The march back to camp was short.  Within half an hour, most of the column was through the wide, wooden gate.  Fifteen minutes after that, the prisoners were forming up.  Lines, thirty bodies long, stretched quickly across the large dirt square in front of the tallest guard tower.  The prisoners stood shoulder to shoulder, and the space between one line and the next was just large enough for a man to pass.  Jae Hee was mildly impressed as he walked along towards the front of the assembly.  A few months ago, there would still be slouching or shifting.  A few of the smarter ones might have been jabbing their neighbors in the back or sides to straighten them up.  The very dumb ones would have been talking.               

Amazing what a couple of crushed or blown-out skulls could do for morale.              

The guards and officers, Jae Hee included, spread out at the base of the guard tower.  The colonel stood in the center, with officers on either side of him according to rank.  Jae Hee was the last officer on the colonel’s right side.  There were only rank-less guards after him, all of them Korean.  For a moment, they stood silently, staring at the assembly.  Jae Hee scanned the faces, running the numbers in his head (little though he wanted to) and realized, not for the first time, that they were grossly outnumbered.  It would be easy for them to charge.  Less than half of prisoners would die, and by the time they reloaded, the prisoners would be upon them.  They’d be ripped apart like rabbits among wild dogs.               

The prisoners were broken men.  _Broken men can be fixed._ Jae Hee tightened his grip on his rifle.               

Finally, after a long and almost awkward silence, the colonel glanced at the officer on his left, who nodded once.  A whisper ran through the left side of the line, growing more and more nervous as it moved down the ranks.  When it reached the end, the last guard snapped to attention.  He bowed once, cap nearly tumbling off his head, and hurried passed the assembly.  Several heads turned after him, a small, jarring shuddering in the otherwise still mass.  The guards to Jae Hee’s left shifted.  One cleared his throat.  All heads snapped forward.               

A third down the lines, the guard turned and strode toward the squat building that made up the guards and officers’ quarters and offices.  They were unattractive things, cracked and rusted and peeling, but were in far better condition than the prisoners’ barracks, on the other side of camp. Nearest the graves.  The guard hurried up to one of the better buildings; the whitewash on its door was still mostly white.  He raised his fist to the door, which swung inward.  Yuuya rushed past him, knocking the guard aside and knocking off his cap as he swept on his coat.                

Behind him, two guards stumbled out with a prisoner between them.               

He was obviously new; his uniform hadn’t been taken away from him yet, although there had to have been a few attempts, considering the rips.  He was taller than the guards, which seemed to make handling him difficult.  He slipped out of their grip several times before one of the guards finally got a good hold on the back of his neck.  They dragged him, bent over, to the nearest empty space.               

“My sincerest apologies, sir,” Yuuya said, out of hearing for the assembly but more than loud enough for the officers.  He bowed low in front of the colonel.  “He arrived after you left and proved very—”               

“Yamashita,” the colonel interrupted.  He was watching the guards manhandle the new prisoner into place over Yuuya’s shoulder.  “Change places with the doctor.”               

There was a momentary shudder in the line as the officers and guards shifted.  Then the officer on Jae Hee’s left bowed.  He stepped back out of line and walked to the left side of the colonel, slipping into Yuuya’s usual place as the fifth officer on the left.  With barely concealed bitterness, Yuuya bowed stiffly.  He walked down the line and slipped into the empty space beside Jae Hee.                

Roll call finally began.               

It was a long, arduous affair, considering the number of prisoners and the guards’ tendency to force them to start over at the smallest infraction or mistake.  One of the officers, little better than the colonel’s secretary, walked down each line, escorted in front and behind by a guard.  Each prisoner he passed called out their number, which the secretary made note of on his clip board.  No numbers were repeated, but there was no actual order to the identification, as far as Jae Hee could tell.  Occasionally, he wondered if there was anything written on the clipboard at all.  He had never seen it, after all.               

And the guards certainly didn’t have to prove the prisoners had been wrong.               

As the minutes wore on, the secretary winding slowly through the lines and the numbers rising up like the low drone of insects, the line at the front shifted.  A low rumbling of soft talk started, and continued without the colonel’s reprimand.  He was still watching the new prisoner.               

Jae Hee turned his head a fraction to the left.  “Familiar, Yuuya?”  Yuuya stiffened beside him.               

“Wipe that smirk off your face, half breed,” he hissed through the corner of his mouth.               

There was no smirk on Jae Hee’s face, but he would admit that it was tempting.  It had been years since primary school, when he watched Yuuya being bested several times and bested him himself several more.  It had been years since the days when arrogance was a safe indulgence because he didn’t quite know what being “half Korean” meant.  He would admit that he missed it, but not enough to risk a smirk in front of his “betters.”               

Jae Hee shifted his shoulders and watched the roll call.             

By the time the secretary reached the third row, Jae Hee was beginning to feel that irritating, stifling heat again.  He found himself, though, less distracted by it.  The third row was where the guards had dragged the new prisoner, and he had ceased his struggling.  He was close to the front, and Jae Hee was just at the right angle, to see the prisoner’s face.  It was slightly pinched and it turned rapidly to observe his surroundings.  No, to observe the prisoners and guards.  His jaw worked.               

Jae Hee knew what would happen before the secretary was half way down the line.               

When he reached the new prisoner, the secretary stopped.  There was a beat of silence.  Then the secretary put his pencil down on the clipboard and glanced up.  Half a heartbeat later, the butt of the front guard’s rifle connected with the prisoner’s head.               

The new prisoner stumbled back into the prisoner behind him.  That prisoner locked his knees to keep himself from moving.  The new prisoner slid down into the dirt.  He spat and cursed as the guards lunged forward and tried to drag him up.  Jae Hee closed his eyes against the sharp sound of wood on skull.               

The scuffle lasted longer than he was used to.  Unbroken prisoners tended to fight longer (in the beginning) but this prisoner was particularly fierce.  There would be an execution in three days.  He wondered if this one would be involved.               

Jae Hee opened his eyes.  The guards had the new prisoner on his knees, a rifle pressed against his temple.  It wouldn’t be the first time someone died during roll call.                

“Heero,” the colonel called.  Jae Hee straightened but knew better than to look at the man directly.  “Explain.”              

Jae Hee bowed stiffly, a low gesture that nearly knocked off his hat.  “Yes sir.”  Rifle balanced against his shoulder, he stepped out of line.  He walked between the line of officers and the first row of the assembly quickly.               

The secretary moved back as Jae Hee approached the small knot around the kneeling prisoner.  The guards did not.  Even when he glanced at them and waved dismissively at their guns, they stayed.  There was a shift in a prisoner behind the secretary.  Laughter was not allowed, but Jae Hee could read the twitches it hid in as well as anyone.  He stiffened.             

“Get up,” he ordered, in only slight accented English, through grit teeth.                

When the prisoner lifted his head, Jae Hee expected to see narrowed eyes and a sneering mouth.  Maybe there would be spitting, if the man was feeling particularly daring.  At the very least, there should have been some cursing.  Instead, there was only a small tightening around the man’s eyes to betray his pain or fury.  He stared up at Jae Hee with that oddly expressionless face for a moment.  Then his eyes drifted carefully to the side, to the rifle barrel pressed against his head.  Jae Hee slid his rifle off his shoulder and knocked the barrel away with his own.               

The prisoner stood carefully.  At full height, he was taller than Jae Hee (and most of the other guards, and quite a few of the prisoners) by almost a hand.  Most of him, however, seemed to be made of arm and leg; they were impossibly long.  The prisoner was lean as well, the sheer bulk of his fatigues making his neck and head seem just a touch too slender for his shoulders.  Almost disproportioned.  His hair hung around his neck in filthy, greasy clumps, and his face was mottled with dust and now-forming bruises.  His split lip was bleeding sluggishly.             

And yet Jae Hee was still reminded of statuary.  Impossibly sculpted, impossibly elegant.  Bernini’s angels.               

“What is your number,” Jae Hee asked.  Only years of practice kept his voice cold and even.               

The prisoner blinked once.  Several muscles in his face twitched shortly: the skin between his eyebrows, confusion; the corner of his mouth, understanding; the underside of his jaw, irritation.  He opened his mouth just as the guard was readying his rifle for another blow.               

“I don’t have one.”               

Jae Hee suspected as much.  “He would say,” he said, gesturing absently at the secretary and the clipboard, “that that’s not his problem.”               

The prisoner blinked again.  With the black and purple bruises darkening his face, his green eyes seemed large and bright.  “And what do you say?”               

Jae Hee turned his head a bit, glancing at the secretary while still keeping the prisoner in sight.  He gestured at the clipboard once and then again when the secretary was reluctant to give it up.  He yanked it out of the secretary’s fingers and scanned the page.  _So there are numbers._ No names next to them, and they were listed in an apparently random order.  Several numbers had hard lines scratched through them.                

“Your number is 14760,” Jae Hee said, handing the clipboard back to the secretary.  It was a scratched out number—the American’s number—but Jae Hee suspected that they had recycled numbers before. “Learn it quickly—"               

“I do have a name.”               

“Here, you don’t.  Learn your number.  You will need it, often, and the consequences that come with ‘not knowing it,’ as you have seen, are unpleasant.”  There is a flicker of anger over the prisoner’s face.  It narrowed his eyes and tightened his jaw.  “You will produce your number during morning and evening roll call, meals, whenever it is demanded.  You will give your number in Japanese, and no, you don’t want to know what will happen if you forget.”               

“I imagine rifles are involved,” the prisoner said through clenched teeth.               

Jae Hee ignored him. “I suggest you listen very carefully, because I will only tell you this once.  Your number is—”               

The Japanese that came out of prisoner’s mouth was heavily accented, but not in the harsher, halting tones that were typical of most Americans butchering the language.   The sounds that came out of his mouth were round and smooth, soft in the beginning and bursting with this unusual accent in the end.  The prisoner’s split lips wrapped carefully around each word, rounding and straightening in slow, precise movements that showed flashes of tooth and tongue.              

If he hadn’t been sneering as he said it, Jae Hee might have thought it was pretty.               

Jae Hee nodded once.  “Acceptable,” he said.  He spun his rifle in his hands and smashed the butt of it across the prisoner’s mouth.  The prisoner stumbled to the side.               

“Do it again without the attitude.”

 

III 

Duo said, months before, that his first death would be the hardest, but Trowa was fairly sure that Duo had never seen an execution.               

The first kill in the field, in the noise and the heat of a firefight, that would be the worst, Duo had said.  When you could see exactly where your bullet went.  When you were close enough to see the hole—bloody and dark, ragged with flesh and fibers.  Close enough to see the life drain out of the man's eyes before his body finished its beautiful, grotesque arc.               

But Duo had probably never watched ten men crumple, one after another, over the lip of their own freshly-dug grave.  Trowa had.  Twice.               

Death didn't get “easier,” Duo had said while leaning against a tree and rubbing Trowa's heaving back.  You just got number.  Your stomach got stronger.  You learned to hold it until you were alone in the woods, “taking a piss.”  And eventually, it stopped.  Death seeped into your skin and settled, and the individual pain went away.  After that, well, not much surprised you anymore.              

Except for the beheadings.  And the casual smirks as the bodies fell one by one.  And the cold, hard way bone snapped beneath a boot.              

As of that morning, Trowa had seen seven executions: three mass shootings, three beheadings, and a beating (although he wasn't sure that hadn't been plain brutality).  Trowa didn't doubt he would see many more, so long as his body held out.  And he didn’t doubt that his stomach would still lurch every time the bodies fell or the heads rolled cleanly off of thin, scarred shoulders.  Even after the hundredth (if he lived that long), he didn’t doubt that his throat would still close when the bullets ripped or the swords whispered through the broken bodies.  He would still flinch.               

Trowa would always flinch, until the day he was the one kneeling in the dust or waiting, naked and red and trembling, at the edge of the grave.  There was no numbing against this.               

_At least I haven't thrown up._   A small but precious miracle, because Trowa was sure vomiting would earn him a rifle butt to the mouth at the very least.  His split lip had only scabbed over two days ago.               

Trowa watched the body—someone new, brown haired and brown eyed and still red from the sun—being dragged away.  He was still at the end of the third line, and he hadn't done anything recently to land him corpse-duty, so he was safe from the smells and the skin and the inevitable trail of blood.  Trowa didn't know where the headless corpses went; there were no prizes to see.  No heads mounted on walls or pikes, offering “fair warning” to the remaining.  He assumed they ended up in the graveyard like the others.  He wondered if they would toss the headless brown-red man on top of the new grave.  It was deep enough to fit a few more bodies.               

Trowa swallowed and resisted the urge to look down the line.               

The execution had come at the end of roll-call.  Once the corpse was out of sight, there was a single, now-familiar, shrill whistle.  The prisoners turned.  It was an oddly complicated move that involved two steps back and a single pivot on the right foot.  It had taken Trowa a few days (and several bruises) to get right.  They marched towards the front gate.  It was opened wide, as it almost always was in the morning, and flanked with a handful of guards on either side.                

One day, he assumed, he would stop assessing the risks of rushing the guards every time he neared the open gate; and on that day, he would either be dead or broken.  Both were equally likely, and equally likely to come sooner than he expected.  He wasn't sure which would be worse.               

Trowa had stopped considering “rescue” an option after week one.                

As the column neared the gate, it narrowed.  The gate, wide as it was, just couldn't fit thirty men marching side-by-side, so a few paces away, the outermost prisoners started squeezing into the limited spaces between.  It was always clumsy, with plenty of stumbling and elbowed faces.  As long as no one tripped, and no fights broke out, though, the guards ignored the mess.  Usually.  Trowa passed through the gate without incident and with only one elbow to the back.                

The quarry was a few miles from the camp.  The dirt road that led to it was wide and well-beaten, thanks to the hundreds of bare and booted feet.  Still, in the packed earth, Trowa occasionally found stones and sticks, even metal.  A particularly sharp piece of scrap nearly cut open the barely-formed calluses on the bottom of his foot once.  The wound, mostly closed now, still twinged occasionally.  He wasn't allowed wrappings anymore and was amazed he hadn't reopened it.  Or gotten an infection.               

Infections had to be common.  Amputations certainly were, to an extent.  Trowa wasn't sure if it counted when the patient died.               

Two rows ahead of him, a prisoner flinched and swore beneath his breath.  Trowa eased himself a half-step to the side.  Faintly rounded stones and a twig or two poked at the soles and arches of his feet.  He considered himself lucky.              

Trowa missed his shoes.  He missed most of his things at one point or another, but the physical memory of the heavy regulation boots constantly worried at him.  They had only been a few months old when he was captured, still solid, with plenty of sole and tread and no holes in the seams.  Trowa missed the clumsy feel of them, the awkward way they pulled him to the ground as he trudged.  He missed the lack of connection with the ground.                

He had no idea what happened to them.  They had been taken, with his uniform and his pack and his rifle, after that first roll call.  Trowa assumed they were torn up for scraps or given to the guards or officers.  None of the prison had gotten anything; they all wore the same (or similar) fraying pants and undershirts.  Half of them didn't even _have_ shirts.                

Trowa missed his heavy shoes and his heavy uniform.  He missed the way it got so stifling and unbearable by midday but was still so much better than sunburn.  Trowa was finally starting to brown, though.  The same way he used to during those long summers in the dock yards.  Which was a good deal better than most of the other Americans.  The back of Trowa's neck and his face were still tendered, but they weren't raw-red and cracking.  _Another mark against me._                

Most of the Americans—and the few Englishmen—in camp had developed something of an intense dislike for him.  Usually, it felt like apathy, and as long as Trowa kept his head down and all eye-contact short, there were no issues.  Some days, though, and with certain men, that dislike was more of a loathing.  On those days, Trowa tried to keep at least three or four bodies between them.                

Trowa frowned and risked a short glance at the men around him.  The same prisoners as yesterday, the same ones tomorrow (if nothing happened to them).  He found it curious, though, that they were all black-haired and black-eyed.  They were all paper-thin and bowed forward just like the Americans, but “yellow”-burned-brown instead of white-burned-red.  The guards didn't exactly encourage yard fights, but they didn't miss an opportunity to enjoy them when they could.  So it was odd to Trowa that they kept him surrounded by locals, who treated Trowa with a touch of fear, instead of some of the more vocal, violent Americans.                

The marches would at least be more entertaining for them, that way.  _Maybe that guard had something to do with it._                

Trowa wouldn't be surprised.  That guard.  He had an unusual interest in Trowa.  Most of their conversations were brief, and ended with some part of Trowa's face or head aching, but they occurred often.  And Trowa had already been told that the guards, and that one in particular, were not encouraged to talk to prisoners.               

If he dared, Trowa could find him.  That guard always marched closer to the rear of the column.  Trowa could look behind him and see, through the lines and lines of heads, his face.  Pinched and irritated, looking forward except for the eyes that sometimes strayed a little too far to the left.                

He could, but Trowa wanted to get through one day without a rifle hitting him.  He stared hard at the back of the head of the prisoner in front of him.               

Finally, the massive column arrived at the quarry.  It was little more than an enormous, shallow hole, ringed with tree stumps.  Whatever they were supposed to be excavating was still covered in feet of dirt, and likely to stay that way.  Trowa had spent the last three weeks shoveling dirt into buckets.  In another three, he might see a rock or two.  As he neared the lip of the hole, Trowa broke off from the main column.  The hundreds of prisoners were separated into "work parties:" one of a dozen different groups that Trowa had to remember.   Every party had twenty or thirty men, and they spent the long days shoveling and hauling dirt in total silence.                

Trowa joined his work party of twenty-five, worming his way into the tight knot standing at the edge of the hole.  He narrowly avoided nodding at the one other American in the group.  The heavyset, red-faced blonde didn't exactly make Trowa feel welcomed, but he had developed a habit of (privately, safely) explaining certain realities of the camp.  And without making Trowa feel like a complete idiot.  Trowa was grateful for the practical kindness and repaid it with not being stupid.  He had learned his lesson after the first execution.              

Trowa slipped into place and tried not to look around for the Asian man who was no longer there.               

After ten minutes or so, long enough to have most of them shifting in the uncomfortable heat, all of the work parties were formed up and the equipment was handed out.  The same half-dozen guards went around first with shovels and then with buckets.   Each pass was slow, but Trowa grew nervous after the first ten minutes, when a shovel was not passed into his hands.  In another twenty, all of the buckets were passed out.  Trowa didn't have one.               

_Dirt-runner._   Trowa hated being a dirt-runner.               

The guards took up position around the hole, near the road, and by the two trucks.  The guard nearest blew a short, sharp note on his whistle.  The work parties starting dropping carefully into the hole.               

Trowa’s work party usually dug a few feet from the lip of the hole, near to the road, which was very convenient for the beginning and the end of the day.  But their dirt-runner, who had to stay near the prisoner passing the full buckets, ended up running.  The two trucks, with the large barrels where the dirt was dumped, were on the far side of the hole.                

Trowa had run dirt a handful of times so far, and while none of them were quite as disastrous as the first (where he dropped the bucket) he still always hoped to avoid it.  There was no switching, however, and he knew better than to even look like he wanted to complain.  Trowa waited at the edge of the hole, hands at his side, sweating.             

The first bucket was passed up in a few minutes.  Trowa took it carefully, holding handle and base tightly, and hurried it around the hole.  Other dirt-runners fell into step behind him; they were all careful not to trip or jostle each other as they turned or back pedaled into the rushing line.  Trowa was third in line when he reached the trucks.  The dirt hissed softly as it slid into the empty barrel.  Trowa turned.  Across the hole, he could see four buckets waiting in his place.  He ran around the hole, passed the bucket back, and picked up the first of the line.               

Twenty or thirty buckets in, Trowa fell into the dangerous rhythm: when he became just a little too aware of how much his muscles throbbed and his skin hurt, and how hard his lungs were working for air that wasn't full of dust, and how little the water at breakfast was.  Trowa fell into the dangerous habit of counting steps and rapid heartbeats and the twinges in his side.  He fell into distracting patterns.               

But the first bucket dropped wasn’t his.  He even managed to dance out of the way of the skittering bucket, which made the guards heading for the fallen prisoner chuckle.  It was only after he had dumped his load and was going back that Trowa realized the fall had been near that place.  Too near.  But Trowa tried not to think about that.               

After another twenty or thirty buckets, when the rhythm threatened him again, Trowa decided he didn’t have much of a choice.               

The spot itself was unmarkable: packed dirt, a few dozen feet from the trucks, without even a tree stump to distinguish it.  But Trowa remembered tripping there quite clearly.  The fall had been spectacular; he tumbled forward several feet after his feet tangled with exhaustion.  His bucket rolled backwards and took out the runner just behind him.  The Asian man had tripped over Trowa, his bony ankle digging into Trowa’s side hard enough to leave a bruise.  They had laid there, a mess of limbs that was difficult to avoid, for several seconds.  Trowa’s head was still spinning when the Asian man climbed off him and grabbed him under the arm.               

Grabbed Trowa.  Not the bucket.  Trowa.               

The Asian man hadn’t managed to get Trowa to his feet.  The guards did that, and then shoved Trowa onto his hands and knees.  But the man had _tried_ , which Trowa learned (later) was stupid and unheard of.  You fell, you got your bucket.  That was it.  You got your bucket, scooped the dirt back into it, and you left the dumb and the fallen for the guards.                

Trowa had gotten the impression the man had done something wrong other than falling by the way the guards shoved him and unusually spitting way they cursed at him.  The prisoners nearest them had paused in their own labor and shifted uncomfortably.  But the guards, after giving the man and Trowa a good set of bruises, had shoved their buckets back into their hands and kicked them towards the trucks.               

Trowa and the Asian man never spoke; they barely even looked at each other, except for one or two times Trowa managed to catch his face as he ran around the hole or waited in line at roll call.                

Three days after the fall, the Asian man was dead.               

He was one of ten that day, a number Trowa knew now was quite common for the executions.  The heavy blonde had explained, in low, begrudging tones during the third meal Trowa couldn’t stomach, that the man had probably just been unlucky.  Prisoners were separated into seemingly random groups of ten, to prevent “dissention.”  Serious infractions by one resulted in punishments for all.  Someone in his group might have been plotting a murder, or an escape, or even an uprising; the Asian man had to suffer the consequences of that idiocy.  More likely, however, was that the guards were simply bored.               

It had nothing, the heavy blonde had said, to do with Trowa or that fall.  Even as he said it, though, the blonde had shifted away, putting noticeable distance between them.  And he, and others, ended up being very cautious when they were around Trowa at the quarry.                

Trowa eyed the spot as he ran around the far side of the hole.  He hadn’t dropped a bucket since then, and he wouldn’t drop one today.                

Eventually, Trowa lost count of his buckets.  He lost feeling as his skin went from warm to blazing to numb under the hard, constant sun.  He lost interest in the mild complaints of his stomach, certain as it was that it needed more but unfortunately used to not having it by now.  There was only the hot dirt under his feet and the hard plastic in his hands and the need to keep running.  So when he reached the trucks with a full bucket, and discovered there was no space in the barrel, Trowa paused.  He stumbled forward as a runner behind him swayed into him.               

The guard standing to the side of the truck nudged Trowa in the side with his barrel of his rifle.  “Bring up an empty one,” he said, in irritatingly familiar, softly accented English.  “And push this to the back.”               

Trowa ground his teeth, a gesture that could easily get them knocked out.  He hid it by kneeling and carefully putting his bucket down by the tire.  He couldn’t risk someone kicking it over; that would still be considered his fault.  Standing, Trowa glanced at the guard.  He didn’t turn his head, just rolled his narrowed dark eyes towards Trowa.  After a moment, he nodded shortly.  Trowa climbed carefully into the back of the truck.               

The back of the truck was largely metal and canvas, and still much cooler than the outside.  Trowa was tempted to stand for a minute—just a minute, until sweat and skin cooled a little—but there were guards and prisoners waiting behind him, and none of them would appreciate him soaking up some of the shadow's chill.  Trowa, bowed forward thanks to the low roof, moved towards the back of the truck.  There were three empty barrels, roughly chest height and just wide enough to make carrying them difficult.  Trowa slipped behind one of them and started pushing it towards the edge of the bed of the truck.  He could carry it.  It was light enough when empty, but he was going to need that little strength.               

Two prisoners, and the guard, waited at the end of the bed.  One of them grabbed the bottom of the barrel after Trowa had shoved it into place.  He lifted it from the truck and took a step back.  The awkward weight made the prisoner stumble but he managed to set the barrel down before he fell.  The long line of waiting prisoners shifted.  Finally, the first walked around the fallen man and dumped his bucket.  The second hurried up before the first even started running.  The line lurched forward, and there was the steady hiss of falling dirt.               

Trowa jumped down from the truck and walked over to the full barrel.  He waited for a moment, first for the second prisoner and then for the first prisoner to get up and join the two of them.  Trowa frowned slightly as the man scrambled towards the barrel.  The kick the guard aimed at him was unusual, for a guard.  Weak.  Almost halfhearted.  If he chose to dwell on it, as he knelt down with the two others and carefully fit his fingers under the barrel, Trowa would notice that that guard seemed both oddly distracted and focused.  That, unlike most of the guards, he stood attention-straight and made no attempts at the idle chatting or bets that were common among the others, but that his eyes were distant and the skin around his mouth was tight with something other than the uncomfortable heat.               

If he chose, Trowa might have noticed that that guard was alone.  Was almost always alone, actually: the sole attendant for some of the duller, worse duties.  Not the absolute but close to it.  If he chose to, Trowa might have wondered about that, and about why, when he wasn’t alone, there seemed to be an unusual distance between that guard and the others, one that was familiar to Trowa.               

But he couldn’t.  He needed all of his focus.               

Trowa didn’t know what they did with the dirt in the barrels.  At one point, he thought it was taken to the graves.  Then he took a long-but-safe look at them during one of the executions.  Even the oldest, with the flesh largely rotted off or picked clean from the bones, were still open.  Trowa couldn’t think of what else could be done with it all, though.  They had to dump it somewhere every evening _.  There’s probably a ruined stream or pond somewhere.  Or a big mess in the jungle._   He supposed it didn’t really matter, though.  Getting the dirt into the truck, that mattered.               

Neither of the prisoners with him were foreign, so Trowa had to rely on eye contact.  Which was difficult, considering how they tried to avoid it.  It took a few tries before the three of them were able to lift the barrel together.  The buckets of dirt made it almost impossibly heavy.  The truck was only a few feet away but Trowa’s arms were trembling by the time they managed to walk it over.  Gritting his teeth, he lifted the barrel the few inches they needed to get it into the truck.  Trowa yanked his hands out from under the barrel as it thudded down onto the metal bed.               

The guard rolled his eyes over to them.  He nodded once and then barked out an order Trowa didn’t understand.  The two prisoners suddenly nodded sharply.  They ran to their full buckets, and elbowed their way back into line.  Trowa watched them dump their dirt into the barrel and start their run back with open concern.               

“Get that barrel to the back,” the guard ordered.               

Most of Trowa’s body was turned towards the hole, one of his hands holding onto the hot metal of the truck bed to keep from swaying.  When the order came, his fingers tightened.  Trowa turned sharply, and he couldn't wipe the irritation off his face fast enough.  The guard’s hands tightened around his rifle.  Trowa tensed.  At this angle, he could dodge a swing to the chin, but that would make the next blow worse.  The guard might aim for the stomach, which would be bearable as long as Trowa didn’t get sick.  Doubled-over, however, he wouldn’t be able to defend himself from a blow to the back of the head.  Not that he would.              

The guard did neither of those things, however.  At least not right away.  After a few tense seconds, he looked ready to bring the rifle up, but by then Trowa had put his shoulder to the barrel.  That shouldn’t have stopped him, of course—it wouldn't have stopped any of the others—but it did.  Trowa was too focused on shifting the barrel away from the edge to dwell on it.              

The hot metal seared through the thin fabric of his shirt.  Trowa flinched but kept his shoulder hard against it, pushing carefully, digging in with his feet and using his hands just to keep it from overbalancing.  It shouldn’t, filled as it was, but it could.  Trowa had no idea what sort of punishment there was for spilling the barrel.  After a few pushes, and few slips, the barrel started inching towards the back, screeching sharply against the truck bed.               

“Surprising,” the guard said, low enough that Trowa nearly missed it as he climbed back into the truck.  Trowa paused, balanced on the edge of the truck, his cheek nearly pressed against the barrel as he prepared to push.  The guard’s head turned slightly.  The corner of one of his dark eyes tilted down and up as he looked over Trowa slowly.  “You are too skinny for it to be so easy.”              

Trowa’s brow furrowed.  It was not the most the guard had ever said to him in one of their short conversations, but it was certainly the strangest.  He rocked back, holding onto the barrel, unable to himself from wondering.  It made his chest tighten and the hairs on his neck rise.  It took him a moment to realize: it was almost, almost dangerously close, to being a compliment.                

The guard turned.  Under his uniform cap, his face was oddly expressionless except for a peculiar gleam in his eyes and looseness around his mouth.  It could have been shock or confusion; it could have been expectation.  Trowa’s breath caught.               

From behind them, a bullet split the air.  Trowa tumbled backwards off the truck.  From his back, Trowa saw the guard trip awkwardly, his rifle falling as his arms lurched forward.  Then he saw the shot prisoner crumple to the dirt.

 

IV 

The last thing Jae Hee wanted to do was admit to his failure, especially not after the colonel had made an “easy” job “easier.”  Unfortunately, he didn't have much of a choice.  The colonel expected results; Jae Hee had none.  He could read English, and Mandarin (and a good deal more Korean than he should), but whatever that prisoner wrote in his journal was none of those.  Jae Hee thought it might be French—he had seen it, in passing, in London—but he wasn’t exactly sure.  His father hadn’t exactly encouraged an interest in languages, unless they could somehow further Jae Hee’s medical career.  Most European languages hadn’t.               

Whatever it was, it still left more than half of that prisoner’s journal an incomprehensible mess.  Jae Hee didn't know what he was going to tell the colonel when he presented the untranslated journal.  Nothing would forgive him for the favor, but he would like to say something a little better than “I can't.”               

On the bright side—miniscule but sweet in its own right—the colonel was still irritated enough with Yuuya that the doctor would not be present for the meeting.  He would hear about, of course.  Eventually.  But by the time the choice piece of gossip made it that far down the grapevine, Jae Hee would be prepared to meet it.               

Jae Hee leaned back against the hot wall outside of the colonel’s office.  His rank prevented him from being anything other than a momentary concern, even considering the “urgency” of the project.  It had been half an hour already since the initial summons; he wouldn't be surprised if he had to wait a half an hour more.  Jae Hee shifted and grimaced.  Although he spent most days standing out in the sun, the chore was no less bearable.  Even in its descent, the sun scoured with light and heat, and while the colonel’s office was one of the few buildings in camp with even a shallow eave, the shadows it cast at this time of day were less than negligible.               

Fortunately, the angle of his lean wasn't prominent enough for a reprimand.  Not that anyone was paying attention at the moment.               

Jae Hee learned, years ago, that he was easy to ignore.  It hadn’t particularly bothered him as a child because he had his dedication to distract him; and whenever he had done something of note (good or bad), he always got plenty of attention.  From everyone, and most of all his father.                

He wasn't bothered by it as he grew, either, even after he became more keenly aware of everyone’s indifference.  He may have been a prize to his father—an elegant beast of burden whose value was weighed in rewards and letters of distinction—and immovable clutter to the family, but his future was tempting enough to make that sort of life bearable.  Korea was little known in the West, and the consequences of being “half” not at all.  Out there, Jae Hee might have been something of an amusing oddity for a time, but eventually they (London, Munich, New York, somewhere) would have accepted him.  After a few months, maybe a few years, they would have valued him for his skill and not for his family, and least of all, for his blood.  Bad or otherwise.                

Jae Hee wasn't bothered by being ignored even now.  If anything, it was the attention that rankled.  When it couldn’t be ignored, his father had always seen his mother’s blood as a burden to overcome; his family, as a disease that could not be helped.  But here, she was thrown in his face and beneath his feet.  Half-blood.  Half breed.  A mongrel, groomed and trained, but a mongrel nonetheless.  And everything from his duties to his title was designed to remind him that he did not belong.               

On particularly bad days, when the prisoners grinned without smiling at the disdain that seeped from every side, Jae Hee almost blamed her.                  

Jae Hee didn’t mind being ignored if it meant that he didn’t have to endure the sneers for a moment.  So he indulged, pulling his cap down his forehead.  He kept a careful eye on the guards from beneath the stiff brim but they were preoccupied with herding the prisoners.  Most of the prisoners headed towards the guard tower to wait in their rows.  A few handfuls, though, were pushed towards the “cafeteria.”  The prisoners stumbled under the awkward weight of rickety tables and vats.  That prisoner included.               

Jae Hee frowned as he watched the unusual prisoner struggle with his end of the table.  At three weeks, he was finally beginning to show signs of wear, which felt like something of a record.  Most prisoners started breaking down after the first week, the sun and the work and the conditions being too much for most of them.  At the very least, they looked ill by the second week.  But this one.  At the end of the second week, most of the bruises he had come in with had faded, and he had learned how to avoid new ones.  His now dusty and dirty skin had started to brown instead of redden, and the lack of food and constant labor had cut into his body differently from the others.  Sharpened him for a long, unusually arresting moment.              

But then that moment passed and the camp started to wear him down.  It was a shame, actually.  The man’s silent, natural resistance had been an intriguing curiosity: a refreshing spark in the monotony.  If he dared to consider it, Jae Hee would realize that he enjoyed watching the prisoner's activities.  He wasn’t beaten like the others.  Not yet.  He was still waiting.  The pressure of the camp hadn’t crushed him yet.  It had barely rounded his shoulders.                

When this prisoner finally broke, it was going to be spectacular.  Jae Hee couldn’t quite explain the odd tightness in his chest when he thought about it, or how his throat tightened when he acknowledge that he would have a hand in it.                 

The wall behind him was thin enough that he could hear the sudden scrap of wood from inside the office.  Jae Hee straightened, tugging his cap back and picking up his rifle.  When the door opened, he was at attention, staring past the guards who finally glanced back towards him.  The colonel’s secretary's mouth flattened with disappointment.               

“The colonel will see you.”              

The colonel's office and quarters were deceptively spartan: a table barely large enough for one; a handful of scuffed chairs; a bedroll and pack tucked neatly into the corner; a chest with a stained pitcher and basin on top.  Compared with barrack-cells of the prisoners and the empty quarters of the guards, however, it was like an elegant family home.  Jae Hee was particularly envious of the chest.  Trying to keep his uniform regulation was nearly impossible when he had to keep it on the floor, or worse sleep in it.  The basin he could do without; Jae Hee spent too many mornings with it, trying to keep the colonel’s jaw stubble free, to want it.               

Jae Hee waited just inside the door, rigid at attention, listening to the quiet scratch of the colonel's pen on some important document.  After a few minutes, Jae Hee chewed at the corner of his mouth, biting back the urge to shift.  It wasn’t the first time he was made to watch and wait, and it wouldn’t be the first time he was caught in momentary laziness.  Eventually, though, the colonel put his pen down and shoved the document away.  The frown he turned on Jae Hee was disappointed, as usual, but it wasn’t tinged with irritation.  He probably hadn’t been caught.               

“Well,” he said.                

Jae Hee bowed his head once stiffly before passing his rifle to the lingering secretary.  Per instructions, Jae Hee kept the journal on his person at all times.  He slid it out of his jacket and wiped the thin layer of sweat from the worn leather cover.  Jae Hee crossed the room in quick, clipped steps and set the journal on the edge of the desk.               

“Inconsequential,” he said, pushing it forward with his fingers before stepping back.  The colonel picked it up and turned it over in his hands.  “Largely personal anecdotes, monotonous and disappointing in nature—”               

Jae Hee had never heard of a harmonic.  It had taken him three entries to understand the concept, and by then it was clear that the man had not made it.                

“—He has a sister and a grandfather in New York, and two company men here that he considers close.  One of them may be a talker—”               

Actually, he was sure this “Duo” was.  The way the man talked around Duo’s work was telling.               

“—but there are no hints regarding the code, nor where they would have gone during the escape.”

The colonel didn’t look at him as Jae Hee spoke, nor when he eventually lapsed into silence.  Jae Hee didn’t mistake that, however, with ignorance.  The colonel had an impressive reputation in the Japanese army; it was age that had doomed him to monitoring a prison camp.  No matter how strong the body or sharp the mind, after a certain age it was simply too risky to allow the aged to have control of actual combat.               

In private, the colonel did not take the change well.               

In the awkward silence, Jae Hee watched the colonel turn the worn leather journal over and over in his hands before opening it.  He thumbed through the pages slowly.  Despite not being able to read a single word, he was oddly focused on the cramped writing, lingering over every page for nearly a minute.  Half way through the journal, his cold eyes slid over to Jae Hee.               

“Largely, Heero,” he asked finally.  Jae Hee had expected the colonel to catch it, but he still stiffened beneath the cold stare.              

“Largely,” he agreed.  He fought the urge to swallow.  “There is a portion of the journal I cannot read.”               

The journal snapped shut sharply.  “How much exactly?”  Jae Hee convinced himself that open hesitation would make it worse.  He was tempted, though.               

“Approximately half.”              

“Then it’s safe to say,” the colonel said, pushing the journal away with open disgust, “that you barely read anything at all.”               

The journal was roughly fifty pages long; half was twenty-five.  The man’s handwriting was small and cramped.  His overall tone went from proper to colloquial and back again at an alarming, irritating rate.  His idioms were largely American.  Jae Hee knew better than to mention any of that.               

“Yes sir.”               

“I’m disappointed in you, Heero.”               

“I'm sorry, sir,” Jae Hee, bowing so low that his cap nearly tumbled off and onto the papers stacked neatly on the table.               

The colonel observed him silently; Jae Hee could almost feel the cold stare drilling into the top of his head.  After a moment, there was a loud screech as the colonel's chair scraped across the floor.  Jae Hee closed his eyes.  The colonel usually didn’t hit hard: a backhand across the mouth that sounded worse than it felt, a kick to the backs of the knees that felt just as bad as it sounded.  The floor of his office, unfortunately, was stone, which would make collapsing more painful.  Of course, there was the one time the colonel had bashed him in the face with the butt of his own rifle.               

Jae Hee hoped it wouldn’t come to that.  He had nearly broken his cheek, and Yuuya’s smirks had been impossible to deal with.               

After a few seconds of tense silence, the colonel stepped away.  Jae Hee twisted his head slightly.  He watched through bangs and the shadow of his cap as the colonel strode over to the chest.  He plucked his own cap off the wood and brushed the brim with hard, short sweeps of his fingers.              

“Bring him.”               

Jae Hee realized, after the secretary didn’t move and the colonel started sneering over his shoulder, that the colonel was speaking to _him_.  Jae Hee straightened, bowed, and straightened again, and still had no idea who the colonel was referring to.  But when he glanced at the journal still on the table, he felt a momentary, worrisome tightness in his chest.  The entries he could read were entirely person.  Mundane recollections, mildly interesting reflections, oddly compelling minor tragedies.  There was nothing to suggest that the coded entries were any different.  The book was worthless.                 

The colonel’s cap was on his head when Jae Hee looked again.  There could be no doubt about his orders now.  Jae Hee stepped forward and reached for the journal.  He had not been instructed otherwise, and no one was reprimanding him for the attempt.  Jae Hee slipped it back into his back before collecting his rifle and leaving the office.             

In the short walk from the colonel’s office to the makeshift cafeteria, Jae Hee realized that the unusual tightness in his chest and the peculiar thudding of his heart were marks of concern.   It was, however, a natural reaction when he knew that the meeting was going to end poorly.  It couldn’t end any other way.  At best, after a boring anecdote or two, the colonel would be quite disappointed and reprimand him for wasting time.  At worst, there would be blood on the floor, quite possibly his own.                

It was natural, he told himself, to feel concern about impending failure.  What was not natural was the odd way the feeling grew and spread when Jae Hee considered the prisoner.  At its best or worst, there would be bruises and blood at the end of the meeting.  Broken bones, a shattered skull.  A couple of bullet wounds.  Jae Hee decided not to think about it, because the way his throat closed was uncomfortable and unwanted.                

Jae Hee couldn't stop himself from considering it, however, when he stopped at the end of the table and the prisoner glanced at him with hard green eyes between small scoops of spoiled rice.  But it was only or a moment.                

“14760, you are needed.”               

The prisoner's brow furrowed delicately, but he had been in the camp long enough to not let the confusion or concern distract him from his duties.  The next scoop of rice was a little smaller than the last.  The guards didn’t punish for less, only more, so the guard looming over his shoulder only sneered at Jae Hee.              

“He’s on meal,” the guard snapped.  The prisoners who recognized the short, rude Japanese, glanced towards the end of the table.  A few of them dared a smirk when they saw Jae Hee.  The other guards openly smiled.              

Jae Hee’s head tilted slightly as he frowned at the guard.  “Get someone else, the colonel wants him.  Otherwise, _you_ may explain it.” 

The guard sneered long enough that Jae Hee began to wonder if he was actually considering it.  It wouldn’t be the guard’s brightest decision; it could quite possibly be his last.  Guards had died in the camp before, not all of them through accidents.  Jae Hee would admit that seeing someone else bearing the brunt of the colonel’s displeasure would be a pleasant change of pace.  The guard probably wouldn’t be as insufferable as Yuuya, either, since there was little to no history between Jae Hee and anyone else.             

But after a tense moment, the guard snorted softly.  He yanked the rusted rice paddle out of the prisoner’s hand before taking the prisoner by the back of the neck.  Pain and irritation flickered across the prisoner’s face, but was gone long before he stumbled to his knees in front of Jae Hee.  He didn’t even glare behind him after the unnecessary shove.  He did, however, glance over briefly when the American the guards had plucked from the queue to replace him swore after him.  Prisoners on meal ate last, if at all.               

That odd tightness returned.                

The prisoner rose slowly, brushing his palms over his threadbare, and now even dustier, bottoms.  Taller than Jae Hee, it was almost impossible for the prisoner to not to look down on him.  Not that he even attempted to look anywhere else.  The bruises around his eyes had deepened from work and lack of sleep, and hunger was cutting hard into his face.  But the green eyes were still clear and dark and intensely focused.  When he blinked once, a slow, curious gesture, Jae Hee was momentarily distracted by the unusual length of his eyelashes.               

Jae Hee stepped back and gestured with the barrel of his rifle.  “Walk.”               

The prisoner walked a few steps ahead of him and to the left, just the right angle for most attacks from behind, and just the right angle for Jae Hee to watch the graceful walk without being observed.  Thankfully, the walk back to the office was short, so Jae Hee didn't have time to notice his preoccupation with the rise and fall of the slender legs, made more powerful with days of digging and running and marching, or the way his still straight shoulders let his arms sway smoothly at his sides.  The prisoner stopped in front of the closed door.  Jae Hee stepped around him and nudged him back with a light tap of the barrel to his chest.  There was slight tightness to his jaw as he ground his teeth but he moved back a step without comment.  Jae Hee knocked twice.               

The door remained closed for nearly two minutes—long enough that Jae Hee felt the urge to shift.  Behind him, he heard the prisoner shuffle once.  Jae Hee hoped the colonel would not make him wait again.  He wasn’t sure he could stand thirty minutes of silence with the prisoner’s heavy green eyes watching over his shoulder.  He might be tempted to talk to the man, and that would not end well.                

Finally, the door opened.  The secretary stepped back around the door.  Jae Hee sidestepped out of the doorway and gestured with his rifle.               

“Inside.”               

This time, because he was accompanying a prisoner, Jae Hee was allowed to keep his rifle.  So when the prisoner paused inside the door and took a slow, openly curious look at the room, Jae Hee jabbed him in the side with it.  The prisoner flinched.  A low hiss rushed through his teeth.  Jae Hee bit back a frown.  He couldn’t remember anyone kicking or hitting the man in the back today, but Jae Hee hadn’t been on post for the last few hours.              

Not that it mattered.               

The colonel, sitting in his chair with his cap on and his fingers tightly clasped around one of his crossed knees, nodded shortly.  Jae Hee prodded him again—it was not gentler, the prisoner was simply prepared this time for the sting—and the prisoner stepped forward.               

“Tell him to read, Heero,” the colonel ordered when they were standing within a few steps of him.  Jae Hee bowed stiffly.

“Yes sir,” Jae Hee said.  Under different circumstances, he would have just leaned his rifle against his thigh.  That, however, would be unacceptable in front of the colonel.  Fishing the journal out with one hand, however, was difficult.  His fingers were unusually clumsy; he barely managed to catch the book when it tumbled out of his jacket.  But Jae Hee did.  He tapped his finger against the worn spine once before holding it out.               

“Read it,” Jae Hee said, “Start at the bottom of the second page.”               

The prisoner stared at the journal for a moment.  He blinked, slowly, a crease just starting to spread across his brow.  The longer he stared at the worn leather and slightly yellowed pages, the deeper that furrowing became until recognition was absolutely certain.  Then those green eyes flicked up and stared at Jae Hee.  And under the momentary surprise, and something that could possibly be relief, was open fury.               

Jae Hee fought his own surprise and momentary concern.  A journal was, admittedly, a private matter.  This was an invasion, but not one, he thought, entirely unexpected considering the situation.  Such a visceral response, though.  _Maybe there **is** something in there._                

The prisoner's cracked lips curled back.  He sucked in a furious breath, but Jae Hee was already kicking at his knees.  Whatever he was going to snarl turned into a hard hiss of pain.               

“Son of a—”               

“I may not be able to read it,” Jae Hee said, “but I’m quite sure it’s not profanity.”               

The green eyes were oddly bright when the prisoner glared up at him.  Jae Hee was not surprised.  He used to tear up when he hit a floor.  He would get used to it.               

“Read it.”  The noise that came out of the prisoner’s throat was almost feral.  He rocked back onto heels beneath him so suddenly that Jae Hee couldn't remember seeing him shift.  The prisoner lunged, and then toppled forward when the barrel of Jae Hee’s rifle interrupted his line.                

“I will shoot you,” Jae Hee said quietly.  The prisoner stared up at him, balanced carefully on his hands and knees.  Jae Hee nudged the journal that had fallen to the floor towards him with his foot.  The prisoner ignored it.  His eyes ran down the long length of the polished rifle once before turning back up.                  

“Then do so,” he said.               

“He says he will not,” Jae Hee translated, without glancing over his shoulder.  Behind him, the colonel shifted.                

“Tell him, you will kill him if he doesn’t, Heero,” the colonel ordered.  With his back to him, Jae Hee was relative safe to clench his jaw.  “If he refuses again, tell him you will shoot him and I will make him lick the blood off of the floor, like the dog he is, until he dies.”               

It was a tempting threat, and one that had something of a success rate.  They had used it once or twice before, on lesser men.  Men who still feared death.  Loathed humiliation.  Clung to ideas that had no place or purpose in these walls.  This prisoner, however, did not care about those things.  Jae Hee doubted that the prisoner wanted to die—he seemed attached enough to his sister and the two company men to warrant a well-hidden desire for survival—but not that he would see death as an acceptable, if unfortunate, conclusion.  Nor would humiliation matter all that much to him, at least not in private.  Outside, perhaps, with more witness.  During roll call.  Then, that threat might have had an effect.  But not here.              

It had to be something else.  Something personal.               

Jae Hee made his decision long before he finished rationalizing it.  An order was an order, and when he could, Jae Hee put very little before himself.  And certainly not a prisoner, no matter how curious and distracting he was.  Besides, there was a secret here, and secrets were not an indulgence allowed inside within the camp’s walls.                

That didn’t stop his stomach from turning, or his throat from tightening, as Jae Hee opened his mouth.               

“He,” he started, gesturing back only with his eyes, “would like me to tell you I will kill you if you don’t.  And believe me I will, if you don't open that journal.  But not until after I’ve ruined them.”  The prisoner's expression shifted, a touch of confusion slipping into the anger.  “Your fingers.”               

The prisoner’s mouth dropped open.  Only a little.  Only for a second.  But it did.  Jae Hee pounced on the weakness.               

“Do you think you will ever play again if I crush them beneath my boot,” he asked, shifting his foot forward.  The prisoner’s hands fisted.  “A few good stamps and they'll be little better than dust.”  The prisoner’s knuckles whitened as he tensed.                  

“Or perhaps,” Jae Hee said, forcing a small smirk, “I’ll cut them off.  One by one, but just past the first knuckle.  Yes,” he said slowly, watching the starved face pale and ignoring the hard clenching in his stomach.  “I’ll let you walk out of here with your ruined fingers, and I’ll wait.  I’ll wait until you’ve convinced yourself that, maybe, you can play again.  Someday, if you practice enough.  I’ll wait until you’ve worked out a system to do your chores and eat your food and wear your clothes with those ugly fingers.  And when you have, when you’re almost comfortable with them, I’ll shove that damn flute in your maimed hands and watch you squirm with it and drop it again and again and again.”  Jae Hee's eyes shifted towards the left, where the colonel was watching them over Jae Hee’s shoulder, and then up, towards the closed office door and the curious secretary waiting beside it, and then back down.               

“Everyone will,” he said, staring down at the lightly trembling prisoner.  “And I will shoot in front of them, after you've begged for it.              

“Or,” he said after a short silence that was interrupted only by the prisoner’s fast breathing, “you can read.”               

For a long, tense moment, Jae Hee worried that he _would_ have to break, or worse amputate, the prisoner’s fingers.  Although he knelt in front of them, rigid and pale, with small tremors running up his arms, he made no move to take the journal.  And the expression he turned up was oddly empty.  But then from behind them, the colonel shifted, and the sharp screech of his chair and the hard clip of his shoes as he stood grabbed the prisoner’s expression.  He flinched back, head bowing forward and his shoulders rising towards his ears.               

Then the prisoner stopped.  He knelt there, curled awkward into himself.  Jae Hee watched him as he shifted.  As he twisted his clenched fists and flexed white knuckles.  A long, slow shudder ran down his back, making every hard, narrow ridge of his spine shake.                

Finally, the prisoner moved back.  Slowly: first, rocking back onto his heels, and then pulling his arms towards himself.  His clenched hands sat in his lap for a moment before finally loosening.  Jae Hee thought he heard bones cracking.                

“Page two,” he asked, voice astoundingly even and horribly hollow.              

“The bottom of it,” Jae Hee clarified.  The prisoner nodded once and leaned forward.  When he plucked the journal from the floor, it was with a reluctant, resigned sort of grace.  He smoothed the cover, and then the front page, with his fingers.  The tips of them lingered for a moment at one crinkled corner.  He breathed a quiet, trembling sigh and turned the page.                

Behind them, the colonel settled back into his chair.                

Jae Hee didn’t lower his rifle, not even after the prisoner opened his mouth and strange, lilting words rolled over his lips.  When he paused, and repeated them in English, Jae Hee nearly dropped it.  He wasn’t sure what he expected, but it was not this.               

“ ‘He calls himself ‘Quatre’. ”

 

_**End of Part I** _

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Cross posted on ahsimwithsake.tumblr.com 
> 
> Part of the Gundam Wing Big Bang 2013.


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